Robert I. Friedman was a Jew. That inconvenient fact may have stopped fanatics like the extremist settlers who once beat him up on the West Bank from doing much worse, due to their concern about religious proscriptions against killing a fellow Jew. At one point, rumors circulated on the West Bank that he was not, in fact, Jewish. Robbie feared they were started by individuals who sought to remove for themselves this barrier to his elimination.

Back in the Middle Ages, cartographers would draw maps of the world with the Holy Land in dead center, and if you never saw those maps you could pick up the Week in Review section of The New York Times and get the idea.
On one page of the section, Thomas Friedman’s column, “Obama and the Jews” was really about Israel and Friedman’s realization that those who care about Israel will be wiser to vote for the candidate “who will make America strongest ... Nothing would imperil Israel more than an enfeebled, isolated America.”